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From: Ed. Barry Smith 2003 the Cambridge Companion to Searle, Cambridge University Press, 261-286

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From: ed. Barry Smith 2003 The Cambridge Companion to Searle, Cambridge University Press, 261-286. Searle, Derrida and the Ends of Phenomenology Kevin Mulligan §1 Searle vs the Rest of the World §2 What was Phenomenology ? §3 Phenomenology and Oxford Philosophy - a Lost Cause ? §4 Phenomenology and Searle §5 Searle vs Derrida. The End of Phenomenology and its Beginning §6 Cant, Cognitive Values and Realism §7 Cant Philosophical and Cant Theoretical §8 Cognitive Value and Realism §9 S*R*L in 1911 §10 Searle's Splendid Isolation 1. Searle vs. the rest of the world In marked contrast to his anglophone peers, Searle has written extensively, and invariably critically, about deconstructionism, postmodernism and other parts of what is sometimes called (although not by Searle) "Continental Philosophy"1or CP. Anglophone, analytic philosophers have written very little, for or against, about what has been said within the different traditions of CP. Richard Rorty's enthusiastic embrace of CP and Searle's withering dismissals are perhaps the two best known results of contact between these traditions and analytic philosophy.2 This is a striking fact. In many disciplines there has been a critical 1 John Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", (Glyph, I, 1977), pp.172-208. This is a reply to Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context", (Glyph, I), pp. 172-197; Derrida replies to Searle's reply in "Limited Inc" (Glyph, 2), pp. 162-254. See also, John Searle, "The World Turned Upside Down", in Gary B. Madison, Working through Derrida (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 170-188; "Reply to Mackey" (ibid.) pp. 184-188; "Rationality and Realism, What is at Stake ?", (Daedalus, 1993), pp. 55-83; "Literary Theory and its Discontents", (New Literary History, 25), pp. 637-667; and "Postmodernism and Truth", (TWP BE (a journal of ideas)), 13, 1998, 85-87. 2 Susan Haack's Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) concentrates more on what I take to be the distant effects of CP than on CP itself. Analytic philosophers outside the anglophone world have often criticised parts of CP with great and effective vigour. See, for example, Hans Albert, Transzendentale Träumereien, (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1975); Jonathan Barnes, "Heidegger spéléologue", (Revue de Métaphysique et Morale, 95, 1990) pp. 173-195; Jacques Bouveresse, Le philosophe chez les autophages, (Paris: Minuit, 1984), Rationalité et Cynisme, (Paris: Minuit, 1984); Pascal Engel, La Dispute. Une Introduction a la philosophie analytique, (Paris: Minuit, 1997). Needless to say, such criticisms are rarely translated into English. An exception: Jacques Bouveresse, "Why I am so very unFrench", in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today, (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 9-33. See also reaction to the invasion of the humanities by what are after all philosophical claims. When Ranke's view that history could and should describe "what was really the case" was turned on its head, a minority of historians were not slow to react3. Similarly, when literary critics began to theorise away claims such as Arnold's - the aim of criticism is "to see the object as in itself it really is", some of their fellow critics reacted4. But philosophers did not follow suit. The relations between Searle, Derrida, CP and phenomenology are complex. The writings of Derrida, the most influential figure within CP, are inseparably bound up with phenomenology and with the transformation of phenomenology effected by Heidegger. Indeed a large part of CP grew out of phenomenology. It has often been claimed that Searle's own contributions to the philosophy of mind advance claims already put forward by the phenomenologists, and Searle himself has given his own account of phenomenology, in particular of the role of idealism in phenomenology. In what follows I argue that the preoccupations of early phenomenology are often those of later analytic philosophers - a point that remains invisible so long as phenomenology is looked at from the point of view of what phenomenology became - but that Searle's philosophy of mind differs on most central points from that given by Husserl. On the other hand, Searle's criticisms of Derrida and of the philosophical parts of postmodernism do indeed have much in common with the criticisms put forward by the early phenomenologists and by Husserl himself of what they saw as phenomenology's gradual transformation and degeneration and of related irrationalisms. A grasp of these similarities will suggest the beginnings of an answer to the question why Searle's anti-Derridas and anti-postmodernisms are such splendidly isolated examples of the genre. 2. What was phenomenology ? Continental Philosophy Analysed, a special number of Topoi, (ed. Kevin Mulligan, 1991); Philosophy and the Analytic-Continental Divide, a special number of Stanford French Review, 17.2-3, (ed. Pascal Engel, 1993); European Philosophy and the American Academy, (ed. Barry Smith, 1994, The Monist Library of Philosophy, La Salle, Illinois: The Hegeler Institute). 3 Cf. Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History. How Literary Critics and Social Scientists are Murdering our Past, (New York: The Free Press), 1996 4 Cf. Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare. Contemporary Critical Quarrels, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), 1993. Phenomenology in the narrow sense begins in 1900 with the publication of the first volume of Husserl's Logical Investigations5 and of Pfänder's Phenomenology of Willing. The theoretical framework outlined by Husserl was accepted by a large number of enthusiastic, young philosophers in Munich. Roughly, the framework runs as follows. A properly theoretical philosophy of logic and of objects in general must begin within a general account of essences or types and of their possible instantiations. It must proceed from there to give specific accounts of the essences of meanings, propositions, judgings, reasoning and of various types of object - ideal objects, tropes, substances, parts and quantities. Formal logic and formal ontology and the philosophies thereof are to be distinguished from metaphysics (and thus for example from all realist or idealist claims about the existence of a mind-independent spatio- temporal world, and indeed from all claims about matters of fact). Claims about what does or does not belong to the essence of a proposition or some other whole provide the ground for, but are not identical with, modal claims. (For example, an emotion essentially has a representational base and so has one necessarily; a truth-bearer essentially contains a predicate and so necessarily). Clarification of what does or does not belong to the essence of this or that involves providing "logical analyses", "analyses of meaning", truths both analytic and synthetic a priori. Such clarification also involves developing central parts of a theory of knowledge and of a descriptive psychology or philosophy of mind. Husserl was, however, often sceptical about analysis where this means providing definitions, the necessary and sufficient conditions of an analysandum. His scepticism about analysis so conceived seems to have been a reaction against the analyses of Brentano and, especially, of Bolzano - perhaps the author of more biconditional decompositions than Frege, Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein together. Hence Husserl's frequent warnings to the effect that equivalences are not propositional identities. In what often seems to be his preferred sense of the word, to analyse is to describe what provides the ground for a proposition or other structure. Many of the philosophers who adopted Husserl's framework applied it in the philosophies of mind, language and society to problems which belong neither to the philosophy of logic nor to formal ontology - the nature of perception, emotions, sentiments, the will, collective intentionality and communication. 5 Logische Untersuchungen, (The Hague: Nijhoff, Husserliana XVIII, XIX/1, XIX/2, 1975- 1984); trans. by J. Findlay as Logical Investigations, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2 volumes, 1970). Husserl makes almost no metaphysical claims in the Investigations. But it seemed obvious to his earliest pupils that he was committed to realism about the external world, not least because of his extended defence of a sophisticated, naive realist account of visual perception. These pupils made up the schools of realist phenomenology of Munich - where Pfänder taught - and of Göttingen - where Husserl taught. Realism and anti-realism can, of course, be understood as formal claims, rather than as metaphysical theses in the sense already mentioned. Husserl's position in 1901 was that propositions dealing with ideal objects cannot simply be assumed to obey the law of excluded middle, where this law is understood as an ontological thesis (for every object and for every property, either the object has the property or it does not). This law, he says, holds only for temporal objects. In a wider sense, phenomenology, or "descriptive psychology", comprehends the philosophies of all the pupils of the Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano - Meinong, Marty, Ehrenfels, Stumpf and Twardowski as well as Husserl. Husserl inherited from Brentano a very strong version of the view that philosophy can and should be a theoretical science. Philosophy so conceived is seen as being perpetually threatened by practical motives and by the doctrine that philosophy is or should be a primarily practical discipline. The ideal
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